Eine Amerikanerin in München

Marijane Mayer, geboren am 27.11.1922 in Wisconsin, USA, als Mary Jane Gerth, lernte Christian Mayer, damals noch nicht Carl Amery, während seines Stipendiats in Washington, DC kennen und folgte ihm 1950 ins noch großenteils zerstörte Deutschland und in eine unsichere Zukunft als freier Schriftsteller. Sie gebar ihm fünf Kinder, bewahrte sich aber immer ein Selbstbewusstein jenseits von Hausfrau und Mutter. Neben einem Hobby als Malerin, das sie bis kurz vor ihrem Tod am 20.10.2019 verfolgte, schrieb sie u.a. einige Geschichten für Kinderbücher und ein Hörspiel für den Bayerischen Rundfunk (hier als PDF). Als Hommage an dieses Leben hier ihre Erinnerungen an Amerika.

I Remember

As I drink my morning coffee on a Munich balcony when windows of the school are open "Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?"  and the amsel swoops near the black cat on the third story windowsill inviting her to a death plunge into the court an a young man comes on to his balcony to test the dampness of the earth in his flower boxes of green foliage but no flowers only a red shirt drying in the wind and in a court a mother takes her crying child form the street door "Look, you have so many nice toys here in the sandbox" party-colored plastic toys as the wind flips darkgreen-lightgreen leaves of the birch where a woman comes onto her turquoise balcony with a cellphone "You must learn to argue it's necessary for your self-confidence" and when someone above me hangs white bedsheets full-length that block out sun and life is on the other side while "We'll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne", I look into my empty cup "Thank God it was only coffee" and stand up to pour another.

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"Don't mind my father," said my eighteen year old cousin. He had heard my great uncle pound up the stairs to my bedroom and throw another, pimply-faced cousin out of the room. He was spending his vacation on the farm as I was, and we were in an annex of this large midwestern farmhouse where there were two bedrooms and a spare room with a manuel organ, chairs with puffed dark red upholstery and arm rests of polished dark wood with lion heads, tables with crotcheted doilies on which small boxes decorated with seashells stood. When I was homesick, I would sit at the organ, pump with my feet and play "Auld Lang Syne" or

"In the little old church in the valley

Where I first learnt of sorrow and joy

I can see mother there

With her head bowed in prayer

While she prayed for her wondering boy"

as the tears rolled salty into my mouth. But there was in that room, too, a wardrobe trunk similar to one I had seen in a colonial museum with a sign "Ghost Cabinet". It was this we were talking about and how we locked our doors at night when our uncle pounded up the stairs, bound into my room, grabbed my cousin by his shirt collar, threw him out of the room and slammed-closed my door. I did not move until my legs no longer held me and my eyes no longe saw the door where no american gothic uncle reappeared with black hollow eyes and soaring grey hair, a pitchfork in his hand.

Dolly and Jim were the two horses that drew the plow or the planter or the cutter or the harvester when on my vacation I brought the mid-morning lunch to the men in the fields. The lunch was always cool freshly pressed lemonade, homemade bread and smoked summer sausage. Sometimes I would show-off and use words like "idiosyncrasy personified" and my cousins would insist that I made up the words.

But to bring the milk to the cheese factory in the morning they had a small dented truck with a windshield but no glass in the doors. When I would ask Pete if I could ride along, he would require a kiss in payment. When I sometimes agreed, for me it was a payment to ride an worn black leather seats with the wind blowing in my hair, the dented aluminum milk cans rattling in the back and the dust from the road following us along the river untiel we reached the small dam shadowed by oak an elm, the road in shadow between the cam and the grey wooden platform of the cheese factory, and when we stopped the dust catching up with us while Pete with one grasp heaved the milk cans into the sun where dry dusty weeds lined the road up to the bend where came the green lawn of a white stucco villa and a naked cherub in the center of a fountain that was the scandal of the village.

Here was the opening of a fairy tale I never managed to enter perhaps because there was no one in the park, no car or coach at the terraced entrance and no one at the windows. The lawn was clipped like the green of a golf course and the house shone white and on the windows hung white drapery. Someone had abandoned a dream or the village had destroyed it or perhaps there was yet a thread of the dream if the lawn and the house and the fountain were still waiting.

Next to the white villa was the home of another great uncle. My mother remembered a summer day when she and her cousins played in the carriage, using a new whip in their fantasy game. The game became lively and in one manouver the fine whip broke. The children set the whip in its holder, balancing the pieces so that they looked whole, then ran into the orchard. They watched as the uncle went into the barn for his first new-whip-ried, watched as he reached for the whip, watched the top piece topple like a corn stalk at harvesting. Mother remembered this as a comic scene. Her punishment was negligible - no mor playing in the barn.

Uncle John was a gentle man. Did he punish his son more severely? I do not remember. What I do remember is years later as a veteran of the First World War he was admitted intermittently to a veteran's hospital to be treated for shell-shock. My father on one occasion agreed to transfer him from the hospital to Uncle John's home but with an overnight at our house because of the distance. He was given the spare room the entrance to which was through my bedroom. Because he was considered a strange but gentle person, I knew I would be considered foolish if I objected to this arrangement.

In the middle of the night, afraid to close my eyes, I saw his silhouette in the door. How long did we stare at each other in the distant light of the hall until he slowly turned back into his room? The reminder of the night was an eternal night.

... to be continued ...